July 23, 2014 at 2:10 p.m.
Some were forgotten (9/6/05)
Editorial
Was race an overriding factor in the New Orleans catastrophe? Probably not.
But class certainly was.
And it's an undeniable fact of American life that African-Americans make up a disproportionate percentage of the country's under-class, those whose poverty made them especially vulnerable to Hurricane Katrina's fury and its aftermath.
That same poverty seems to have made them invisible to emergency planners in advance of the storm.
As everyone knows by now, a storm like last week's came as no surprise.
There were numerous exercises run. There were countless plans developed.
Yet in the course of that planning, the poorest among us were left out of the equation.
Well in advance of Katrina, local and state officials knew that considerably more than 100,000 residents of New Orleans lacked the ability to evacuate when a mandatory evacuation order was issued.
And at that moment in the planning process, those people — so visible now on our television screens — became invisible.
How complicated would it have been to organize a bus evacuation of the poor in advance of the storm?
Would it have been expensive? Probably.
But it wouldn't have been nearly as expensive — in both loss of life and the cost of rescue — as the events which have played out the past several days.
Equally invisible were the patients in the city's hospitals, particularly the general hospitals serving poor and ordinary folks.
At what point, we wonder, in the advance planning process did someone write those people off?
When did they decide that those particular Americans didn't matter?
It's a legitimate question to wonder whether race was a part of that decision.
Our best guess is that it wasn't race so much as voicelessness which made the difference.
The poor — largely black in the case of New Orleans — and the sick and the elderly and the infirm had no one speaking for them when the plans were made.
No one was there to say, "What about us?"
And because of that oversight — a moral lapse which will haunt those involved for the rest of their days — they were forgotten. — J.R.[[In-content Ad]]
But class certainly was.
And it's an undeniable fact of American life that African-Americans make up a disproportionate percentage of the country's under-class, those whose poverty made them especially vulnerable to Hurricane Katrina's fury and its aftermath.
That same poverty seems to have made them invisible to emergency planners in advance of the storm.
As everyone knows by now, a storm like last week's came as no surprise.
There were numerous exercises run. There were countless plans developed.
Yet in the course of that planning, the poorest among us were left out of the equation.
Well in advance of Katrina, local and state officials knew that considerably more than 100,000 residents of New Orleans lacked the ability to evacuate when a mandatory evacuation order was issued.
And at that moment in the planning process, those people — so visible now on our television screens — became invisible.
How complicated would it have been to organize a bus evacuation of the poor in advance of the storm?
Would it have been expensive? Probably.
But it wouldn't have been nearly as expensive — in both loss of life and the cost of rescue — as the events which have played out the past several days.
Equally invisible were the patients in the city's hospitals, particularly the general hospitals serving poor and ordinary folks.
At what point, we wonder, in the advance planning process did someone write those people off?
When did they decide that those particular Americans didn't matter?
It's a legitimate question to wonder whether race was a part of that decision.
Our best guess is that it wasn't race so much as voicelessness which made the difference.
The poor — largely black in the case of New Orleans — and the sick and the elderly and the infirm had no one speaking for them when the plans were made.
No one was there to say, "What about us?"
And because of that oversight — a moral lapse which will haunt those involved for the rest of their days — they were forgotten. — J.R.[[In-content Ad]]
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